Barbara Pym, pictured at home in Oxfordshire in 1979.
Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

James Thurber, remarking on the difference between English and American humour, said that whereas the latter consists of making the extraordinary seem ordinary, the former turns on transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Readers of Jane Austen will perhaps agree, as will those who enjoy EF Benson’s timeless Mapp and Lucia novels. Barbara Pym belongs in this company. Indeed she more than the others illustrates Thurber’s point about English humour - it delights in tiny little things; and by that standard, Excellent Women stands as one of the most endearingly amusing English novels of the 20th century.

Like Jane Austen, Pym painted her pictures on a small square of ivory, and covered much the same territory as did her better-known predecessor: the details of smallish lives led to places that could only be in England. Neither used a megaphone; neither said much about the great issues of their time. In Excellent Women the reader is made aware of the fact that, not long before, there had been a war, but what that war was about is not touched upon. With Jane Austen, the fact that a major war was raging hardly impinges upon the consciousness of the characters. And yet although Pym’s novels are about as far away as possible from engagement with the great political and social issues, they are powerful reminders that one of the great and proper concerns of literature is that motley cluster of small concerns that makes up our day-to-day lives. This is what gives her novels their permanent appeal.

We fill our lives with small things, and they become immensely important to us. Barbara Pym understands that

Excellent Women was Pym’s second published novel, and in the view of many it is her best. She had written her first book, Young Men in Fancy Dress, at the age of 16. The wonderful title perhaps gave a hint of what was to come. Men, young and otherwise, were to form a major focal point of her writing; men, wryly and sometimes wistfully observed by a single female character, bring both excitement and disappointment - and mostly the latter - to the heroines of all her books. Excellent Women is as much about men as it is about women; the excellent women who populate this novel are excellent because they have been described as such by men.

The first novel Barbara Pym wrote as an adult, Some Tame Gazelle, was initially turned down by a number of publishers. Few novelists have the good fortune of their work being accepted by the first publisher to whom they show it. Many, no doubt, are sufficiently discouraged by initial rejection to give up there and then. Pym did not, and eventually, in 1950, Some Tame Gazelle saw the light of day. Two years later, Excellent Women was accepted for publication. Over the next 11 years Pym continued to write her highly individual, small-scale novels, each of them a little gem. Her reputation grew, although she remained a modest writer, working in a rather dull job at the International African Institute, a setting which provided her with considerable inspiration for some of her novels.

Then, in 1963, disaster struck. She sent off the manuscript of her new novel, An Unsuitable Attachment, to Jonathan Cape, her usual publisher, who rejected it. There are various possible reasons, but the explanation that the author herself chose was that her writing - and the world it portrayed - was considered old-fashioned. That has the ring of truth about it: even if the 1960s were years of intellectual experiment and rapid social change, they were also years of some shallowness and silliness. Of course Pym would be considered old-fashioned in the decade of flower power and drugs, and publishers, like anyone else, might have been carried away by the heady atmosphere of the times. But the fact remains: this unfortunate pursuit of the zeitgeist, along with the numerous rejections that followed, silenced an important author for some 14 years. She continued to write, but not as much as she might have done had her manuscripts been published.

The long-overdue rectification came in 1977, with the famous championing of her books by Philip Larkin and David Cecil in the Times Literary Supplement. Now at last she was given her due, and was showered with invitations and expressions of interest from those who had previously ignored her. How satisfying it must have been, if not to her, then at least to her friends. What wonderful embarrassment for those who believed that an unmitigated diet of gritty social realism, graphically described sexual couplings and sadistic violence was what readers really wanted - and all they should get. The entire time the reading public, or quite a large section of it, was really yearning for the small-scale delights, the beautiful self-deprecating humour and the brilliant miniaturisation of Pym’s novels. It was the same in children’s literature: what children were being given was an offering of improving, pious and very dull tales; what they actually wanted to read was adventure and excitement and, believe it or not, boarding school stories. Eventually Miss Rowling was allowed to give them that.

There has been no diminution of Pym’s reputation after her death; indeed it has been steadily enhanced. An indication of this is the fact that she has become an adjective, the finest compliment that posterity can pay any writer. There are very few novelists to whom this has happened - Graham Greene notably became not only an adjective but also a territory, Greeneland, a land of seedy hotels and forgotten colonial corners. It also happened to Hemingway - a life described as Hemingwayesque is one filled with bullfighting, hunting, and deep-sea fishing. To say that a moment is “very Barbara Pym” is to say that it is a self-observed, poignant acceptance of the modesty of one’s circumstances, of one’s peripheral position. Such a moment also occurs when one realises that for those whom one is observing, one will never be an object of love. Tolerant affection, perhaps, but never deep, passionate love. Indeed, one is not really entitled to expect such an emotion, although it is ennobling, some say, to observe it in others.

The world portrayed in Excellent Women is one of shortages and genteel drabness. It is not a world of real poverty - that is not Pym’s territory. The characters have all known better days in one way or another: they come from a vicarage background but are now in shared accommodation; they appreciate better fare than the tinned food they eke out; their lives might have had more light in them. Is this a world that the contemporary reader can recognise? I think it is. Certainly London is a very different city from the city described in this novel. It is more cosmopolitan and dangerous, more alienated from its hinterland than ever before, but it is still recognisable in this book. And Excellent Women transcends its particular historical setting, as do all of the Pym novels, because it says something about human aspirations that is as true today as it was when it was written: we all have our hopes; we are all, to an extent, and unless we are very lucky, unfulfilled in some parts of our life; we would all like things to be just a little bit better for us.

That world of vague longing is described in this novel in a way which not only shows us the poignancy of such hopes, but allows us to smile at them. One does not laugh out loud while reading Pym; that would be too much. One smiles. One smiles and puts down the book to enjoy the smile. Then one picks it up again and a few minutes later an unexpected observation on human foibles makes one smile again.

It is these asides, I think, that make Excellent Women so beguiling. The plot itself is not without interest, but it is the narrator’s comments on her world and on the scraps of pleasure it allows her that are so utterly engaging; as where Mildred says, right at the beginning: “ ‘I have to share a bathroom,’ I had so often murmured, almost with shame, as if I personally had been found unworthy of a bathroom of my own.” To be found unworthy of having one’s own bathroom is such an unexpected notion, but it is amusing because it is a cri de coeur of frustrated ambition, of a desire to be something that fate will clearly never allow one to be.

We all want to be happy- we all want a bathroom of our own - but this happiness, for an awful lot of us, is elusive. We fill our lives with small things, and they become immensely important to us. Barbara Pym understands that, and in celebrating these little things so vividly, she helps us, I think, to be more sympathetic to others. If it is a mark of a great novel that it should help us to feel for others, that it should touch our human capacity for sympathy in an important way, then Excellent Women, a novel that on one level is about very little, is a great novel about a great deal.

· Excellent Women will be reissued next month as a Virago Modern Classic. To order a copy for £5.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 or go to theguardian.com/bookshop